WAI - Feb 9 - IFTTT is an automation service that hopes to bridge the gap between connected devices to create a more seamless experience. IFTTT (which stands for "if this, then that" and rhymes with "gift") allows users of connected devices and digital services to easily integrate them across platforms to better suit their needs.

IFTTT CEO, Linden Tibbets, explains how the newest developments to the platform hope to enhance their experience for both developers and the average Joe.

In February 2015, IFTTT split into two apps: IF, which focuses on automation, and DO, an app that allows users to easily trigger an action with the press of a button. How's this division helped simplify things?We see this as the first step of many towards a more rich experience around recipes. The idea of recipes has always been that it could be much, much more than "if this, then that." It could be much richer and at the same time, for the user, it could be much easier to think about. They just need to think about if they want to do this thing or not; whether that uses 2 channel or 200 channels should really be up to the developer to decide what that recipe can do.

That split between DO and IF allowed us to experiment with another type of recipe, a recipe that involves just a press of a button, and we have been really blown away by what people have been able to do with the DO button and DO apps.

It has really enforced that these apps themselves aren't necessarily where all the interaction is. In fact, almost 40% of the button presses that happen within the DO apps happen on the Android Widget and the iOS Today Stream Widget. That was a little bit surprising, but also really in line with the way we thought about the world, and that not everything was going to need to have an app. The way of thinking that you need an app for every single connected device and every single service is really going to be extinct here really soon, and we're going to start looking at new modes of interaction and new ways of making things happen in our world outside of just traditional apps.

Are you finding DO is attracting more users that may feel intimidated by programming? Could this be a gateway app to IF?Yes, DO certainly has been more attractive to folks who may be a bit intimidated by programming. In fact, we are not setting out to build a programming language for consumers. We think that the idea of a recipe, at the same time it gets richer and more complex, can also get simpler for our general audience.

So we think people with a developer mindset that aren't intimidated by programming are going to continue to build increasingly richer experiences that recipes can represent, and most folk can just decide, Do I want to do this thing? Yes or No.

The Future is Bright

You currently have hundreds of existing channels and recipes, with users publishing more every day, with so many new connected devices being introduced all the time, and no end in sight, how do you expect IFTTT to evolve to accommodate everyone? This a problem that we are uniquely set up to really tackle. We want to keep things really simple and continue to streamline what using IFTTT and using recipes really means. We want to make it incredibly personal. As we have more and more channels and integrations on IFTTT, there is a better and better chance that those channels can represent the type of devices and services you uniquely use, that are different from someone else.

Our platform is well on its way to allowing developers to really understand what people are doing with their service and create recipes that meet some of those needs that people are trying to express today with simple versions of recipes. We are allowing developers to really go above and beyond IFTTT and DO to address those needs.

There has to be a lot of coding and work that goes into keeping the various APIs working so these recipes will continue to work. This is obviously not cheap, but I don't see advertising on your site or even in the free software that you provide. How does IF currently monetize or plan to monetize in the future?It's actually not a lot of work because of the platform that we've built. We have a developer platform that is still in private Beta, and developers are effectively building and maintaining those integrations for us. So we have really taken a corner on an exciting development, that developers have seen enough value out of being part of the IFTTT ecosystem that now they are doing that work and electing to really build and maintain and improve their integration on IFTTT over time.

That points directly to how we want to monetize. That developer platform is still in its infancy. We plan on heavily investing and making that platform the platform of the future. Not just the way that developers plug into and represent their brand on IFTTT, but really a way for developers to build seamless experiences across services, platforms, and devices.

What is your vision for the future and IOT and IFTTT's role in it? Where would you like to see IFTTT in 5 years time? In 10 years time?It's no longer profound to say that every single thing in the room you are in right now is going to be connected to the Internet in some way. How that's going to work and what that's going to look like is still anyone's guess, but it will happen. The Internet is going to jump out of our browser and into the real world sooner than we think.

What that represents is that each one of these connected devices and the services built around them is going to be built by a different company or some subset of different companies. The old way of thinking about software was to think about these vertical silos, and we've essentially surrounded ourselves with vertical silos. Some of those silos grew to encompass many vertical silos (like Google, Apple, and Microsoft), and what IFTTT is all about and the part we'd like to play is to allow developers to cut across those silos horizontally and integrate with both the data and the capabilities that each one of those vertical silos represents.

So when we talk about this idea of seamless computing and seamless experiences in the platform that IFTTT is working on, this is going to enable developers to build those seamless experiences and that's what we think the future is all about. A way for everyone to experience a future in which the Internet is both pervasive and friendly and works the way that people want it to.

Our team is incredibly excited about bringing the future about, and I think we are working on some really big and bold new ideas for that platform, for recipes, and for how it all fits together so that in 2016 we are going to deliver in a big way.

WAI - Jan 29 - The market is flooded with the latest apps, the newest wearables, and spectacular innovations in the Internet of Things. There is no end in sight for this explosion of technology designed to make our lives easier, healthier, and more fulfilled.

The biggest problem, however, is that there are so many particular instances of innovation, differing by platform, operating system, or API design, that it is all but impossible to use them together in a seamless way.

In this interview, he explains his motivation for creating IFTTT, how the platform is altering the way we view the world of IoT, and how IFTTT hopes to ease us into the future.

How did IFTTT come about?My background is both in computer science and design. I was working as an interaction designer and was really struck by the amount of what I call "creative control" people exercise in their physical world every day. We are constantly modifying objects in our environment, using them in small ways outside the range by which the original designers of those objects intended.

For example, putting a pencil behind your ear, putting your jacket on the back of your chair, or using your hip to open the door instead of your hand. We do this stuff thousands of times per day and totally take it for granted. Really, what we are doing is effectively programming our environment, making it better suited to meet our needs.

In that same level of creative control, this ability to adapt your environment to you needs, was really missing as things went digital and crossed over into the realm of Facebook and Salesforce and connected light bulbs.

That was the sort of insight that drove everything we've done since then. How do we make this digital world just as malleable and fluid to allow individuals and developers to be extremely creative with how objects and digital services work together in the digital world?

How many users do you have currently?We don't share current numbers, but to give you a sense of scale, folks on IFTTT have created over 31 million recipes to date. We run about 35 million recipes per day, so think of that as combinations of saving files to Dropbox, turning off your lights at night, letting you know when it's going to rain tomorrow, etc.

We have over a million unique individuals that have a recipe do something for them each day. So, we've hit a pretty large scale considering how many connected devices and services are out there today.

Who is your typical user?Right now, it's typically someone who's looking to get something more out of the services they currently have. Folks that have some deep experience with one or two or three individual services, these could be services like Gmail or Google Calendar, Facebook, or perhaps someone who is big into sports and ESPN, or wearables, like someone who has been wearing their Fitbit everyday for a year, or someone who just got a new Nest thermostat and has some really neat ideas about what they want to do above and beyond what you can do with just that individual item or service.

So, typically they are folks that have deep expertise within each one of those service areas, and you'd actually be surprised, that is just about everybody. Anyone who is using the internet today has a set of things that they understand at a really nuanced level and is capable of taking that further.

Are there any particularly large communities that you would consider "power users"? We've seen that those that are early adopters in the connected home really love IFTTT. The people that are going out there buying $200–$300 items and connecting them to the internet, even though that is still quite a struggle to get something connected and keep it connected to the internet. These are the people who are using IFTTT to get a tremendous amount of value out of objects that without IFTTT really just talks to its app and does its thing, but with IFTTT, can connect to a much broader set of services and other devices.

The Maker community is incredibly passionate about IFTTT, we have seen it used for a lot of very interesting Maker projects. Other large communities around IFTTT include people doing marketing and managing social media.

IFTTT's Next Lift

Your company has exploded from a few dozen, to almost 250 channels. These include not only social media and news feeds as in the beginning, but now you've integrated home connected devices, productivity services and wearables, as well as many others including iPhone apps and your new Android channels. Are there any up-and-coming integrations we can expect in the near future?Of course, the home is incredibly popular and we're going to see a ton of connected home channels. We now have over 70 connected-home channels, but we are going to see that number explode past 100 after the holiday season, as people gear up to try to get their device under the Christmas tree.

The home is just a small piece of the general excitement around the Internet of Things, there are so many things connecting to the internet that we will see over the course of the next year, and I think one of those big categories will be the automobile. There will be all kinds of devices around the car, like garage-door openers, different car accessories, and with car manufacturers themselves getting online and getting connected they will be looking to see what else their audience or other developers can do with this new connected endpoint.

Alongside that, we are incredibly excited about other enterprise [software-as-a-service] type tools, we are starting to look at a lot of tools that other developers are using to compliment the set of consumer IoT, wearable, and other services that IFTTT has today.

What's the most remarkable recipe for a wearable or other device you've encountered?We've seen some really neat recipes for wearables, specifically around some of the fitness trackers, people using IFTTT as a way to unlock some other real world reward. For example, [if] you hit your step goal, then it unlocks a cookie jar or a certain cabinet in your house.

We've seen that people really love to control their lights, to change the color of their lights as sort of a social party trick, but there's no end to the different things that people want to connect to lights—for example, using the ESPN Sports integration we have to change the lights to match their sports team's colors for the game.

One of our fellow engineers here named Jim Heising actually built an internal private channel that controls eight TV monitors in the office, and we can post all kinds of interesting things on them. Those TV's have really turned into a shared community message board, and that has been really really fun.

That is getting into the idea of what developers can do with our platform once they really have access to it.

Who do you view as your biggest competitors, and what advantages do your services have over the rest?I don't think there is another major technology company out there that doesn't yet have some sort of IoT platform, or is at least starting to talk about their IoT platform. We view each one of them not as competitive, but complimentary.

On the surface, a lot of people may say IFTTT is just another IoT platform, but we think about the world very differently. We're not just about devices, you can elicit a lot of those connections that we have that have nothing to do with IoT, we are about services.

To take that even further, we're about enabling seamless experiences for consumers. I think a big problem for developers today is their ability to develop for multiple platforms at the same time. What we are aiming to do it not be an IoT platform, but to be a seamless computing platform and enable developers to build those seamless computing experiences of the future.

For more, including new opportunities IFTTT has in store for developers, check out part 2 here next week.

WAI - Jan 15 - We spoke to Mark Gainey, CEO and cofounder of Strava, a social network for athletes that makes use of GPS devices and other wearables to create what they call a "social fitness" experience. Strava uses the vast amounts of data being collected by various connected devices to provide motivation, track stats, record maintenance, and status of gear and equipment, and encourage camaraderie among its members.

In this interview, Gainey explained why he thinks wearables will continue to make fitness a more enjoyable and seamless part of our everyday lives.

How was Strava founded? What were your inspirations? Michael Horvath and I started Strava in 2009. We both rowed crew at Harvard in the late ’80s and thrived on the camaraderie and motivation of training with teammates. The idea for Strava came simply from our desire to recreate the positive forces of our crew experience when we no longer had the structure and support of a team.

In its simplest form, Strava was a "virtual locker room" where we could share workouts among friends. We started Strava with a focus on cycling, and added running in 2011. Since its founding in 2009, Strava has grown from a handful of users to millions of athletes around the world. Our mission is simple—to motivate and inspire our members in ways that unlock their potential.

Strava is known for being more than just a way to log workouts. It's a social fitness app that encourages users to connect with each other. As more and more people are buying and using wearable devices to track their fitness, what changes have you seen in how users are interacting in the Strava community?Millions of cyclists and runners around the world not only track and analyze their training with Strava but also use it as their social channel to connect with other athletes and stay motivated. Almost 90% of all Strava athletes follow another athlete on Strava, and the average Strava member engages with Strava 5-7 times a day. According to our members, "If it’s not on Strava, it did not happen."

Strava is growing rapidly and is truly global. We add over 100,000 new members every week, and almost 80% of our athletes live outside the US. We have activities on all seven continents and in over 180 countries.

We see our members interact with Strava in a number of different ways. We are now compatible with over 150 different GPS devices. So our athletes can track their activities in whatever way they find most convenient. And then they can seamlessly upload to Strava via our mobile apps and website.

What sets Strava above the competition?Talk to most of our competitors, and you’ll find they refer to their audience as users, not members. Talk to a Strava athlete on the other hand, and they will tell you they may have "downloaded" other fitness apps, but then they "joined" Strava. We are for more than an app. We are a community.

Strava designs products for passionate athletes. They love their sport, strive to improve, and want to connect with people who feel the same way. We feel that we’ve built the best home for this kind of athlete, and that’s what separates us from our competitors.

Our athletes are fully engaged, online and offline. They support each other on Strava. We have an inspirational, passionate community that I believe is unmatched.

Beyond smartwatches and fitness trackers, what other connected devices are being used with the platform, or would you like to incorporate in the future?We support data input from nearly 150 third-party devices, including everything from Garmin bike computers to Fitbit wearables and shirts with integrated sensors. We have built our own training apps for iOS, Android, Android Wear, and Apple Watch. This allows us to analyze everything from GPS data to physiology and nutrition data. As our athletes add more connected devices to their daily fitness lives, we are dedicated to helping them bring context and color to the information collected.

Where do you see the wearables market heading in the next 5 to 10 years, and how will Strava adapt to keep up?We see the integration of fitness sensors becoming even more seamless—in clothing, in bicycle frames, in running shoes, et cetera. And we expect these wearable devices to provide more in-depth data and feedback. With our focus on our passionate athletes, we will continue to design technology that provides motivation and inspiration for our members. Strava is always innovating to serve the athletes. We seek to inspire and unlock potential. We're a company full of athletes, so designing products that leverage our wealth of data and athlete insights to help athletes improve is at our core.

It's easy to feel overwhelmed with all the information coming at us, and the introduction of wearables and other connected devices has done little to help with all the mind-cluttering.

We spoke with Niina Venho, the CEO of Moodmetric, a smart ring that hopes to help users learn how to manage these overload stressors. She explains that the key to a more peaceful life is to track emotional levels, learn to calm the mind, and keep tabs of our emotional past.

Tell us the Moodmetric founding story. Why did you choose to focus on measuring emotions?People know a lot about their physics nowadays. We know our weight, pulse, heart rate variability, sleep patterns, oxygen saturation - and are very pleased to have all this information.

There are plenty of wearables that collect data about our physical performance, at Moodmetric we did not want to develop just another activity meter. Measuring our mind and emotions should be at least as important as measuring our physics, still there are not many devices to give us any of that information. We wanted to work on something that benefits anyone wanting to develop their mental capacities.

Our inventor, Henry Rimminen, has a long background in biosensor technology research. He was familiar with the skin conductance measurement used in psychological research, which tells about emotional levels of the wearer and is a perfect indicator of the emotional load. The equipment currently used for these measurements are clumsy and filled with wires. Henry´s idea was to combine it into a ring - what a perfect form factor for emotions!

We wanted to make a scientific sensor that was small, attractive, and looks more like a jewel. The opportunities in the emotion measurement are huge. There are application possibilities in many industries, for example in digital and mobile health, user experience analysis, content marketing, psychological and cognitive research, and workplace wellbeing.

Keeping Your Cool

What are the benefits of learning to calm your mind? Losing your temper is never the best course of action.

Uncontrolled behavior in the workplace is no longer tolerated. Abusive supervision or mean bosses cost close to $25 billion annually for corporations in the United States. Companies are looking for people that are emotionally balanced. Emotionally intelligent people build better relationships, have better communication skills, and they manage conflict more productively.

It is our responsibility to take care of our own emotional balance. It's not just about your personal benefit; your mood also affects others. Stress, self-awareness and emotional balance are closely connected. Understanding yourself is a tool that can be used to manage stress as well as any other emotion. The stress costs are six times higher. Absenteeism, diminished productivity, and on-the-job-accidents cost $300 billion annually.

Whatever you do in life, emotional intelligence is something that is important to build. Knowing how to get calm and stay calm when needed is a great place to start.

Who is your target market? Everyone looking to be better connected with their minds and wanting to build their self-awareness. For the most part, our current customers are research for us. We're using the opportunity to do skin conductance measurement in such a small and wearable form. We want to address the consumer market as well and believe everyone can benefit from a scientific emotion level tracking tool in nice little package.

Moodmetric is currently following a number of important trends, including biohacking/quantified self, corporate wellbeing programs taking mental health into consideration, mindfulness and meditation, as well as design wearables and smart jewellery.

Who are your notable competitors, and what sets you apart? There are other biofeedback devices said to train mental fitness and help cope with stress, many of them are based on heart rate variability measurements. Heart-rate variability is a good indicator of stress levels, but it is reliant on measuring heart rate, which is most accurately measured from the chest area. The signal then needs to be analyzed and filtered to understand how a person is reacting, while the skin conductance measurement directly tells the emotional activation level.

EEG measurement devices do help to calm the mind and they have great possibilities in brain and cognitive research. However, they require a headband with several contact points, and are unlikely to become popular for continuous daily use in the near future.

What sets us apart from the laboratory devices is that the Moodmetric ring measures skin conductance from where it is best to measure, from the palm side of the hand or finger, and can be used anywhere. Our reading is very accurate and it is live, continuously updated data can be seen on the smartphone app.

Looking To The Future

What do you see for the future of wearables, and what role does Moodmetric hope to play in that future? New devices are entering the market combining more measurements, and having more features. I feel that people are now testing many devices trying to figure out what works best for them. "Do I manage with one wearable or do I need several?" The novelty seekers are trying them all out.

Moodmetric aims to be the number one in measuring emotions and providing both the consumers and researchers a simple yet accurate tool for it. We are very open about others using the Moodmetric technology, we offer our development kit free and would like to build a whole ecosystem around skin conductance measurement. We hope to partner with other companies and innovators to build services around: mood monitoring, individual and workplace wellbeing, programs targeting to calm the mind, cognitive research, and much more.

How do you think wearables will change how we act and interact with those around us? My colleague does her 10,000 steps per day and I feel the need to manage the same, or, my husband tracks his sleep to perform better throughout the day, so maybe I should as well. Wearables have the potential to improve communication. For example, the Moodmetric ring can alert the family if the mother has had a very stressful day, or it can tell that grandpa is taking his daytime nap. The possibilities for improving interaction are simply endless. Wearable technology can ease our lives and make communication smoother in many ways. My personal wish is for us to still talk to each other!

WAI - Dec 2 - Wearable.ai is shifting to focus on interviews. There's some awesome news content on ReadWrite.com web if you want to stay ahead of Wearables news. We're going to focus on interviewing the movers and shakers in the wearable computing and IOT industry moving forward. The key innovators and executives. Please email me at mark@wearable.ai if you have any comments or concerns about this. Thanks. ;-)

TECHLICIOUS - Nov 29 - Misfit has launched the BaubleBar Helena Necklace and BaubleBar Helena Bracelet, both accessories include a locket that holds the thin Misfit Flash or Misfit Flash Link tracker beautifully concealed in a locket design that's both classic and modern. The piece also comes with an oval-link chain, 32 inches for the necklace or 6 inches for the bracelet.

INDIA TODAY - Nov 29 - Mio Global has entered the Indian market and launched a bouquet of products on Amazon India. The company has launched the Mio FUSE, Mio Alpha 2, and Mio LINK wearables in India starting at Rs.6,599. In the last 6 months global players in fitness wearables like FitBit and Jawbone have launched their products in India. Jawbone's products are available on Amazon India.

MOBILE COMMERCE PRESS - Nov 28 - It consists of a small clip-on device that can be attached to a bra strap or to the waist of a wearer's pants. This allows the device to track breathing patterns in order to determine whether the wearer is tense, focused, or calm. If the wearable technology detects too much stress, it sends an alert to the user's smartphone.

CNET - Nov 29 - The device appears to rest on one side of the face, tucking over one ear with the display perched just above the eye. Images are included with documentation for the new patent. The patent describes a device that could adjust to each user's head and recall that configuration for later use. The device would offer a heads-up display for playing video that could even be viewable in the other eye via a prism.

TELEGRAPH TIMES - Nov 26 - The wearable devices startup launched by Indiagames founder and former CEO Vishal Gondal, has raised $13.4 million in Series A funding led by New Enterprise Associates and joined by Great Wall Club (GWC) and Singapore based DSG Consumer Partners.

NEW SCIENTIST - Nov 26 - The device, which straps to a baseball cap, can work out the intensity of a task and when a person switches to another task – just from their head movements. The device could silence a phone or deliver only emergency notifications when concentration is needed, announce when users need to take a break, and could also make risky jobs safer by giving workers a ping or other cue to pay extra attention when their task becomes particularly demanding.

HNGN - Nov 25 - Israeli researchers have announced that they have successfully developed a flexible sensor technology that has a sense of touch and the capability to self-heal like real skin. The sensor is made of synthetic polymer, a material that has remarkable self-healing properties. The self-healing artificial skin is comprised of a self-healing substrate, high conductivity electrodes and molecularly modified gold nanoparticles.

QR CODE PRESS - Nov 25 - ABI Research has shown that the market specific to AR tech will be worth an estimated $100 billion by the close of 2020. The prediction was that 21 million units of augmented reality based devices would ship in 2020 alone. This would represent a CAGR of 78% occurring between 2015 through the end of 2020.

FORTUNE - Nov 25 - Ericsson is working with Orange Telecom to test three networks for handling the expected deluge of data from a growing number of Internet connected cars, refrigerators, and industrial sensors. The goal is to create networks that do a better job of funneling data collected by devices. Innovation based on the Ericsson-Orange tests will start appearing in networks as soon as 2017.

BIDNESS ECT - Nov 25 - In its last quarterly results, Fitbit reported above-consensus revenues and EPS, and posted a strong 4QFY15 guidance. However, the stock saw a sell-off, after the company’s management announced that it intends to sell 21 million shares in a secondary offering.

KHALEEJ TIMES - Nov 25 - Etisalat has partnered with Ubimax, a provider of wearable solutions, to conduct trials on the next generation of smart glasses. Etisalat will leverage its infrastructure and IoT capabilities to conduct trials of the wearable solutions on government and enterprise customers to demonstrate their business potential before introducing them to the market. Based on the result of the trials and customer feedback, Etisalat will subsequently create offerings across its international footprint of 18 countries.

APP ADVICE - Nov 25 - The Fossil Q Founder is priced at $275 and features a stainless steel link bracelet design powered by an Intel Atom processor. It delivers notifications to the wrist, it features an activity monitor, and you can use Android Wear's card-based OS in order to navigate through content using the circular screen.

WAI - Nov 25 - We've been running wearable.ai and faithfully summarising the daily news for over a year now. How are we doing? Please email me at mark@wearable.ai or comment under this post. We'd love to hear your feedback on how we can do better, or any of your thoughts on the wearable.ai news summary service? - Mark Brooks